Tag: decisions

Business can be confusing. There are a million decisions you need to make with very little time to formulate your decision, and usually these decisions are made in complex situations.

We can make rapid-fire decisions easily when we can wrap our minds around the situation but the more complex the situation gets, the harder it is to make a decision.

So here are 15 questions you can ask and answer to help you gain clarity when you make complex decisions. You won’t know the fully answer to each one of these but even the exercise of attempting to answer these questions will help the fog to lift so you can see the path toward an answer.

How would I describe this situation?

How would I describe this situation to a child?

How long will this situation last?

Will the situation increase in severity, decrease in severity, or remain constant?

Am I the only one experiencing this? If someone else has experienced it, how did they handle it? (Even if they didn’t handle it well, that information is still helpful to me.)

Have I ever experienced a similar situation before? If I have, how did I handle it? (Even if I didn’t handle it well the first time, that information is still helpful to me.)

What was the cause of the situation? What was the cause of the cause?

What were the Political, Economic, Social, and Technological influences that allowed this situation to come about?

Are there any influences (organizational or individual) that will continue to influence this situation, perhaps changing it as time goes on?

What is the true cost of this situation?

Who is impacted? (There are usually more people impacted than you realize.)

What are the most likely outcome(s) of this situation if I do nothing?

What are ALL of the actions I could take in this situation?

What are the outcomes of each action that I could take?

Which actions and outcomes deliver the greatest benefit to me, my business (in the short-term and long-term), and my customers?

It’s funny when you notice something that becomes a pattern… Kind of like when you learn a new word and then you start hearing that word all the time. Once you see it in one place, you see it everywhere.

The same thing has happened to me with the following concept…

I’m doing some consulting with a company that is going through a period of rapid growth. They are expanding in several different and exciting ways, and all this change is mostly good but it also creates some challenges. While talking to the owners yesterday, they said to me that they are trying to take emotion out of the situation so they only deal with things logically.

I’m also writing a book for a client and he talks about the value of making decisions based purely on a logical decision-making criteria versus basing your decisions on in-the-moment emotion.

And in my personal life, I have a family member who is considering the positives and negatives of a fairly big change in their life. And in a conversation they had yesterday, they said to me: “I know the logical reasons for the change but it’s the emotional reasons that are holding me back right now.”

I was watching a TV show that took place during the suffrage movement, and the argument made in the show (and presumably in real life, at the time) was that men were logical and should be the ones to vote while women were emotional and therefore not equipped to make good voting decisions.

In each case, I encountered someone who sought to remove emotion from the picture so they could only look at things logically.

At first glance, this idea of logic trumping emotion sounds good: Logic is clinical, analytical, focused (Hey, didn’t SuperTramp sing about this?)… and in our modern, scientific society, this approach is highly respected. We’re advanced enough to know that we aren’t guided by fate or luck but that our own decisions shape our future. We also think that applying 100% logic and 0% emotion to every decision will give us the very best outcome in every situation; that the application of a scientific approach will, by its very nature, take us to the best choice.

But is that true?

Until recently I probably would have said it was. I’ve always been kind of a studious academic kind of person who appreciates a logical, analytical approach to things. (Well, most of the time. My high school science teacher might disagree). But I’ve been rethinking it a bit and yesterday’s encounters have forced me to articulate my thoughts.

Here’s what I’m thinking about…

IS LOGIC THE OPPOSITE OF EMOTION?

I think this is a big part of the puzzle. We tend to think that logic is the opposite of emotion. On the one hand, you have a logical, analytical approach. On the other hand, you have an emotive, impassioned approach. One is step by step, the other is a frenzy of feeling.

I don’t think that’s true, though. Logical approaches can’t always arrive at a conclusion through a step by step process. Logic is true for a moment but as the world changes, the logic that decisions are built on will change as well. Take the example of my family member contemplating a large move. For many years, their current location was right. It was the logical approach for their situation. But now the situation has changed so the logic needs to change. Therefore, logic isn’t as clean and as precise as we want it to be.

We tend to think of logic being driven by our brain while emotions are driven by our heart, which, scientifically, is of course not true. Both logic and emotion come from the same place.

We tend to think that logic and emotion compete with each other. But do they? Sometimes it seems that way (as is the case in all four encounters I had recently) but it’s not always the case. Your marriage, your decision to have children, your decision for a career, and the purchase of your home (to randomly choose four HUGE decisions we make in life) are often born out of a congruence between logic and emotion. For example, logic says: “This person will make a good life partner” and emotion says: “I love this person” — so there’s congruence between the two. So there are times when logic and emotion work together.

(Admittedly, there are often times when emotion and logic are not congruent — when there’s a logical approach to something and an emotional approach to something. In those situations, we often think we need to defer to the logical approach.)

I think if logic and emotion were truly opposites of each other, they would more often work at cross purposes — logic would tell us to do one thing and emotion would tell us to do another… way more frequently than they do. And although that does happen (sometimes too frequently), it doesn’t happen consistently.

So I don’t think we can say logic is the opposite of emotion. They’re two approaches we take or two viewpoints we have or two “lenses” through which we see the world. They come from the same place (our minds) and they sometimes take divergent paths (but sometimes they don’t).

Which leads to my next point…

IS IT POSSIBLE TO REMOVE EMOTION FROM DECISIONS?

Name a decision in your life in which logic made 100% influence on the choice and emotion had 0% influence.

I think you’ll have a hard time finding one. Logic and emotion are intertwined in every decision. Sure, one usually wins out over the other and there are times when you deny one in favor of the other. But each was still present; each one still influenced the decision in some way.

Even a sale that is made logically is really made emotionally first. Ask any salesperson or copywriter. You always sell to emotions first and foremost and then you back it up with logic. Even when you’re selling to a large corporation, you’re still selling to the emotions of the decision-makers first. That’s a sales 101 concept that has stood the test of time.

We all have logic and emotion — both are present in, and shape, every decision we make from the largest to the smallest. The choices we make throughout the day are guided by whether they are fully congruent or whether we choose to listen to one and ignore the other.

EMOTIONS ALREADY GUIDE SO MUCH OF OUR LIVES

On a piece of paper, create two columns — one that says “Logic” and one that says “Emotion”. Now start listing decisions you made in your life in which one trumped the other. Again, I think it’s impossible to say that any decision was made solely on the basis of one of these influencers over the other. But I think you’ll often end up with ideas like “Career, house purchase” in the Logic side and “Spouse, children” in the Emotion side. We believe our logic guides us on the practical issues while emotion guides us on relational issues.

But I think you’ll agree that logic and emotion present in all of our decisions. And we’re okay with emotion being the dominant influencer in very important decisions (that are often relational in nature). So it’s not like we don’t trust emotions to guide us properly. In fact, I’d argue that we trust our emotions to guide us during our most important decisions (my emotion-dominant choice of a spouse is considerably more important than my logic-dominant choice of a car).

Furthermore, we’re emotional creatures who often measure the quality of a day by how happy or sad or angry (or whatever) we were that day.

We can’t suck emotion out of our lives.

So if that’s the case, what place do emotions have in business?

SHOULD EMOTION HAVE AN EQUIVALENT PLACE TO LOGIC IN BUSINESS?

I think they should.

Emotion is the weather vane of our satisfaction. When things are going well, we’re happy. When they’re not going well, we’re upset. Our goal in business should often be (within reason) to pursue our own satisfaction by increasing the things that make us happy and decreasing the things that make us upset. Negative emotions point to problems we need to address right away. The more acute the emotion, the bigger the problem that needs to be addressed.

Emotions are connected to our intuition. Anticipation and anxiety are both emotions that grow out of our intuition of what something is going to be like.

Logical and emotional alignment feels right. When that happens, we feel confident in our decisions and actions.

SO, SHOULD WE DO BUSINESS IN A FRENZY OF EMOTION?

Logic and emotion both come out of the same place yet sometimes they take divergent paths.

But I think we often try to deny emotion in favor of logic… and we shouldn’t: We can’t ignore or eliminate emotion entirely from any decision, plus emotion gives us an excellent guide to how things are going.

So, when our logic and emotion align, I believe we can move forward with confidence.

And, when our logic and emotion do not align, we should take that as an indicator to zoom in more closely and inspect the situation. Rather than deny emotion and go with the logical choice, we need to accept that something is not right and we should try to discover what piece of the puzzle is missing that is causing the misalignment.

Aaron Hoos is a writer, strategist, and investor who builds and optimizes profitable sales funnels.